Kahlil Joseph: Shadow Play is currently on view at the New Museum and includes the debut of Fly Paper (2017). According to the New Museum website: “Fly Paper is a new film installation that departs from Joseph’s admiration of the work of Roy DeCarava (1919–2009), a photographer and artist known for his images of celebrated jazz musicians and everyday life in Harlem. With Fly Paper, Joseph extends DeCarava’s virtuosity with chiaroscuro effects to the moving image and brings together a range of film and digital footage to contemplate the dimensions of past, present, and future in Harlem and New York City. Joseph’s new film also touches on themes of filiation, influence, and legacy, marking a personal reckoning that intuitively calls upon his connections to the city through his family—and in particular, his late father, whom he cared for in Harlem at the end of his life. Fly Paper’s dynamic yet contemplative mood also builds on Joseph’s sense that layers of lived experience—and stories—are sedimented in the places that have played host to the aspirations and daily lives of countless individuals.” Read more on Shadow Play and Fly Paper here.

liquid blackness also extends its congratulations to Joseph for his recent win of the Film Craft Award for cinematography for Process at the 2017 Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

Artist and cinematographer, Arthur Jafa has directed the debut video for the first-release and title track of JAY-Z’s 4:44. According to ArtNews the video is a collage much in the style of Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death, the work that Jafa showed last year at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise and which he previewed in the spring of 2016 at the liquid blackness event “Can Blackness Be Loved” hosted at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta. Jafa had previously worked with Beyoncéon elements of the “Formation” video and with Solange on the “Cranes in the Sky” video. A free preview of the video is available here and full viewing requires a Tidal subscription.

Artist and cinematographer, Bradford Young’s three channel video installation, REkOGNIZE is on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh now until December 31. As described on Carnegie Museum’s website, REkOGNIZE features Young’s footage of the Hill District, shots of Pittsburgh’s tunnels, and a translation of several Teenie Harris photographs into matrices of metadata. This digital code is also the basis for the work’s musical score by jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran. Read more here.

From October 6, 2017-January 7, 2018, British artist and filmmaker, John Akomfrah will debut Purple, an immersive, six-channel video installation for the Curve: Barbican in London. Purple charts the incremental shifts in climate change across the planet and its effects on human communities, biodiversity, and the wilderness. As the follow up to Vertigo Sea (2015), Akomfrah’s standout work at the 56th Venice Biennale, Purple forms the second chapter in a planned quartet of films addressing the aesthetics and politics of matter.

In light of his upcoming exhibition at the Venice Biennale, artist, Mark Bradford is interviewed and profiled in The New York Times on what it means today to be considered an American artist. Bradford is perhaps most famous for his work in mixed-media collages such as “The Scorched Earth” exhibition at the Hammer Museum in 2015; the concept of liquid blackness was described for the first time in the catalog accompanying the exhibition.

Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, The Message is Death, a short single-channel video piece, opened over the weekend at MOCA L.A., marking the video’s debut on the west coast. The video, which Jafa previewed last spring at the liquid blackness event “Can Blackness Be Loved” hosted at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, will run at MOCA through June 12th. Read more including an interview with Jafa here.

liquid blackness joins in celebrating John Akomfrah’s winning of the 7th edition of the Artes Mundi Prize, the largest arts prize in the UK. The Artes Mundi prize is awarded to a single artist who is judged to have consistently made thought provoking work of exceptional quality that fits within the criteria of the prize.

The prize of £40,000 is designed to allow the winner to develop substantial new work or the time to reflect on their practice and move it forward. Founded in 2002 by Welsh artist William Wilkins, the Artes Mundi Exhibition and Prize is Wales’ biggest and most exciting contemporary visual art show, the largest art prize in the UK and one of the most significant in the world. According to ArtNet News, the Artes Mundi 7 Prize was awarded for Akomfrah’s presentation of Auto Da Fé and for a substantial body of outstanding work dealing with issues of migration, racism, and religious persecution.

ASAP (Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present) is accepting submissions through March 15th for the 9th annual meeting to be held October 26-28, 2017 at the Oakland Marriott Convention Center and hosted by U.C. Berkley. Submission guidelines and more details are available here.

In the January 23rd issue, The New Yorker highlights the exhibition of Arthur Jafa’s video piece, Love is the Message, the Message is Death at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise as “required viewing.” Jafa previewed the piece before the screening of his film, Dreams are Colder than Death at the Civil and Human Rights Museum in Atlanta as part of a 2016 SCMS conference event hosted by liquid blackness last spring.